(here comes a rant, watch out)
...because I can't read it. Not because I don't own a copy of Windows and haven't run it for over five years. Not because I'm a "geeky Microsoft hater." It's because MS Word files aren't even compatible with past or future versions of MS Word on Windows itself, let alone on Mac. It's because there's no free .docx to .doc conversion service anywhere on the web, even though the 'softies bribed the ISO committee to get OOXML (hahahaha, OBJECT-ORIENTED XML?!?!? that's like "MS Visual Object-Oriented COBOL") accepted as a standard. It's because the lovely ad-hoc tables that you hacked up in MS Word between visits to Cute Overload collapse into an overlapping jumble of typography unless the margins are set to the exact same number of millifurlongs as yours, even though the margin setting doesn't happen to be a part of your document. It's because you e-mail me a form, then expect me to print it out, fill it out by hand, and FAX it (remember that lovely '80s all-caps trademark? oh wait, you were just a twinkle in your father's eye then!), complete with my credit card number all in plain-text, to some random phone number in another state.
You could send... ASCII? Unicode? a web form? a PDF even, which I could print out, fill out by hand, scan in, and send to you via encrypted e-mail (because you've put your public keys on the website, right?)? Alternately, if you happen to reject post-1950's technology, you could send a physical piece of paper via traditional physical mail, which I could fill out by hand and put in a paper envelope with a money order and send back to you?
3 comments:
Gentlemen, to the telex machine: I must dispatch this report about the position of shipments along the rail line to the main office.
Also, you might find Clay Shirky's talk at the Long Now foundation very interesting.
MS Visual Object-Oriented COBOL
*twitches*
*flails*
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